As explained in U.S. Pat. No. 7,738,646, customer support systems provide a customer a line of communication to a product or service provider by providing a convenient means for connecting to an enterprise call center that may include an automated service and support system, e.g., an interactive voice response (IVR) system and/or a live service agent. Because an enterprise requires a minimum service quality level to keep their customers happy, these systems require several technical features, such as call load balancing, queuing, system performance report generation, call monitoring, etc. These features are generally implemented by disparate technologies from multiple vendors and are generally expensive to create, run and maintain. Other significant costs include the salaries of service agents and technicians. Hence, in an effort to reduce these costs, outsourcing and/or off-shoring (both to captive and third party service providers) have become prevalent practices among enterprises.
Just as enterprises have moved their customer service business processes to outsourcers, both on- and off-shore, many consumer-oriented businesses have also done so with their sales processes. But the sales process presents special challenges for call center operators that are not necessarily present in the technical support arena. For example, in the context of a sale, callers are typically responding to recently viewed or presented offers and promotions. Some of these calls may be of an impulse nature, or at least may be made during a caller's limited free time and, as such, callers may not tolerate lengthy delays before being connected to a sales agent. In the face of such delays, callers may terminate the call before reaching an agent, resulting in a “call abandon”. The sales process is particularly sensitive to call abandons, as each represents a potential loss of revenue.
In order to guard against excessive call abandon rates, enterprises (and/or their call center operators) must generally ensure that there is sufficient staffing at their call centers to avoid losses of revenue. However, the timing of increased call volumes is often driven by factors outside the control of the call center management. This is particularly true if radio and television commercials are the motivating factors for these calls.
The problem is magnified if an enterprise uses multiple call centers to service its sales calls. Typically, long distance (and/or toll-free0 network carriers load balance calls across multiple destinations in a static fashion. Static load balancing does not take into account any performance factors at the various destinations, as there is neither information available to the carrier from an automated call distributor (ACD) at each destination, nor is there a system within the carrier network able to process any such information even if it were available.